The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(4)

And when we assemble the full lineup of negative emotions—sadness standing next to contempt perched beside guilt—one emerges as both the most pervasive and most powerful.

Regret.

The purpose of this book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion—and to show you how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to your life.

I begin with the reclamation project. In Part One—which comprises this chapter and the next three—I show why regret matters. Much of this analysis taps an extensive body of scholarship that has accumulated over the last several decades. Economists and game theorists, working in the shadow of the Cold War, began studying the topic in the 1950s, when obliterating the planet with a nuclear bomb was the ultimate regrettable act. Before long, a few renegade psychologists, including the now legendary Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, realized that regret offered a window into not only high-stakes negotiations but the human mind itself. By the 1990s, the field widened further, and a broad group of social, developmental, and cognitive psychologists began investigating the inner workings of regret.

These seventy years of research distill to two simple yet urgent conclusions:

Regret makes us human.

Regret makes us better.

After I’ve reclaimed regret, I’ll move to divulging its contents. Part Two, “Regret Revealed,” rests in large part on two extensive research projects of my own. In 2020, working with a small team of survey research experts, we designed and carried out the largest quantitative analysis of American attitudes about regret ever conducted: the American Regret Project. We surveyed the opinion and categorized the regrets of 4,489 people who comprised a representative sample of the U.S. population.[*] At the same time, we launched a website, the World Regret Survey (www.worldregretsurvey.com), that has collected more than sixteen thousand regrets from people in 105 countries. I’ve analyzed the text of those responses and conducted follow-up interviews with more than 100 people who submitted regrets. (On the pages between chapters, as well as in the text itself, you’ll hear the voices of participants in the World Regret Survey and peek into every corner of the human experience.)

With these two massive surveys as the base, the seven chapters of Part Two examine what people truly regret. Most academic research on the topic has categorized regrets by the domains of people’s lives—work, family, health, relationships, finances, and so on. But beneath this surface I found a deep structure of regret that transcends these domains. Nearly all regrets fall into four core categories—foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. This deep structure, previously hidden from view, offers new insights into the human condition as well as a pathway to a good life.

Part Three, “Regret Remade,” describes how to turn the negative emotion of regret into a positive instrument for improving your life. You’ll learn how to undo and reframe some regrets to adjust the present. You’ll also learn a straightforward, three-step process for transforming other regrets in ways that prepare you for the future. And I’ll explore how to anticipate regret, a behavioral medicine that can help us make wiser decisions but that should also come with a warning label.

By the time you reach the end of the book, you’ll have a new understanding of our most misunderstood emotion, a set of techniques for thriving in a complicated world, and a deeper sense of what makes you tick and what makes life worth living.

    “I regret pawning my flute. I loved my flute in high school, but when I got to college and was broke I pawned it for thirty dollars and never had the money to go back and get it. My mother worked so hard to pay for that instrument when I was in beginner band and I loved it so much. It was my prized possession. I know it sounds silly because it’s a ‘thing,’ but it represented so much more—my mother supporting me and making payments on an instrument we couldn’t afford, hours and hours of practice learning to play, happy memories with my closest friends in marching band. Losing it is something I can’t change and I have a recurring dream about it.”

Female, 41, Alabama

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“I regret rushing to marry my wife. Now, three kids later, it is difficult to go back in time, and divorce would break up and hurt my kids too much.”

Male, 32, Israel

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“When I was a child, my mother would send me to a small local store for a few grocery items. I frequently would steal a candy bar when the grocer wasn’t looking. That’s bothered me for about sixty years.”

Female, 71, New Jersey





2.


    Why Regret Makes Us Human



What is this thing we call regret?

For a sensation so easy to recognize, regret is surprisingly difficult to define. Scientists, theologians, poets, and physicians have all tried. It is “the unpleasant feeling associated with some action or inaction a person has taken which has led to a state of affairs that he or she wishes were different,” say the psychotherapists.[1] “Regret is created by a comparison between the actual outcome and that outcome that would have occurred had the decision maker made a different choice,” say the management theorists.[2] It is “a feeling of unpleasure associated with a thought of the past, together with the identification of an object and the announcement of an inclination to behave in a certain way in the future,” say the philosophers.[3]